Planned Parenthood affiliates from around the country are suing the Trump administration for its efforts to promote sex education programs in public schools that teach young people to make healthy lifestyle decisions rather than topics such as masturbation, anal sex, LGBT sex, the morning-after pill, and abortion.
The lawsuits were filed in federal courts by Planned Parenthood affiliates in New York City, Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Nebraska, and Washington.
Planned Parenthood claims the Trump administration wants to force an “abstinence-only agenda” on young people.
“Young people have the right to the information and skills they need to protect their health,” Dawn Laguens, vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said, according to the Associated Press. “The Trump-Pence administration is trying to impose their abstinence-only agenda on young people across the country.”
The Trump administration cut millions of dollars in grants from Obama-era Teen Pregnancy Programs (TPP) to Planned Parenthood after data revealed the programs were not effective.
The Obama administration had eliminated all funding for sex education programs that stress abstinence, favoring, instead, comprehensive sex education (CSE) programs, promoted by Planned Parenthood and LGBT rights groups, that assume most adolescents are sexually active and that also normalize all teen sexual behavior:
In an interview with Breitbart News in 2017, a top Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official said 37 evaluations of TPP programs were performed for grant applications to fund the programs.
“Overall, of the 37 funded and evaluated projects, 73% either had no impact or had a negative impact on teen behavior, with some teens more likely to begin having sex, to engage in unprotected sex, or to become pregnant,” the official stated. “Very few positive results were sustained over time.”
Yet – despite the negative results – HHS observed the same curricula “remained on the TPP approved curricula list for the second round of replication grants, begun in 2015.”
“Given the strong evidence of negative impact or no impact for these programs, continuing the TPP Program in its current state is not a reasonable option,” the Trump HHS Department concluded. “The evidence stands in stark contrast to the promised results, jeopardizing the youth who were served, while also proving to be a poor use of more than $800 million in taxpayer dollars.”
HHS also noted CDC’s report that, while teen sex and pregnancy rates are at record lows, sexually transmitted disease (STD) cases are at record highs. Consequently, the agency says sex education “should be centered on science in the promotion of optimal health outcomes.”
The sex ed programs provided by Planned Parenthood have drawn the ire of parents around the country and abroad. In April, parents in cities across the U.S. and in Canada, Australia, and the U.K. participated in a “Sex Ed Sit-Out” to protest what they say is “pornographic, gender-bending” sex ed curricula taught by the taxpayer-funded abortion chain.
Earlier in June, Christian evangelist Rev. Franklin Graham also condemned the graphic sex ed curricula pushed in public schools and urged parents to take action against those with an “agenda to lure” children “into promiscuity.”
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